Now its up to you: Please download and test against your own scenarios or try helping to get some bugs fixed.

Last 3 months I spent more then 30% of my time to test, find bugs, help making them reproducable, discuss at bugzilla, test again against I-Builds and N-Builds to help eclipse projects and to give value back to eclipse. I’m using many eclipse projects from modeling to runtime in my daily work – and without those projects I won’t be able to support my customers or even to make my own open source projects (redView and red-open) to run with Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).

Many bugs were fixed thanks to the committers working hard on it – here are two of them making my life easier:

Target Platforms now compile well after restart (Bugzilla 309795) 🙂 – using many projects with complex Target Platforms this is a huge perfomance boost. Together with the new MercurialEclipse 1.7.0 snapshots (this updatesite) startup time of redView multi-project mercurial – repos our team-developer workspace starts up lightning fast.

Feature based Launch Configs are now working (Bugzilla 308633) 🙂 – using feature based Launch Configs I can provide one single Launch config for all platforms, because the Feature is the same and Eclipse automatically uses the platform-specific fragments.

…so it was worth to spend my spare time helping with the bugzillas 😉

Some other bugs are open or nearly finished – here are three bugs I hope will be fixed before the final release comes out:

Export Target Platform to Directory sometimes failed

I tried the new functionality to export a complete Target Platform to a directory first time using Helios M7. There I got problems using plug-ins with nested jars inside. Now I tried again using Helios RC1 and now it failes with compile errors.

I like this new feature to export the complete Target Platform, because then you can work offline and reset Target Platform without any problems – or you can share Target Platforms between installations or inside your team.

…the next one is only a small problem, but a stopper:

PDE Ant Task should allow binary cycles

If you’re developing OSGI bundles then you should avoid cycles, but if you’re using 3rd party bundles, then perhaps you have to live with this.

Thanks to PDE this isn’t an issue, because you can set a flag that “binary cycles are allowed” if you’re exporting Plug-ins and Fragments:

…but if you’ re using the PDE Ant Task to do the same work, the flag “allow binary cycles” is missed:

No more RAP into the IDE please

If you followed my blogs you know that I was fighting last two months with the problem that P2 installs RAP into the IDE. It becomes better from week to week, but there’s still some fine-tuning to be sure that it will never happen again using Helios. Here are some bugzillas around this problem:

…the last weeks it becomes better and better and there are only some random situations where still RAP comes into the IDE.

I really hope that this problem will be fixed until Helios is final. The first solution, where projects with optional dependencies to RAP declare these dependencies as “greedy=false” inside of p2.inf was a great help. But then it can happen again if someone else declares an optional RAP dependency without a correct p2.inf – so its much better to declare conflicting-strategies at the source: at this time a great thanks to the rap team hard working to make this possible.

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I know there are many bugs open and in work, so excuse me promoting the bugs mentioned in this blog.

over all: it’s much work, but also much fun to work with so many people from so many projects to make Helios a great release.